Geoffrey Lean is Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago.

We rightly worry about damage to landscapes, but what about soundscapes? Rarely mentioned these natural symphonies – made up of diverse species each finding its own acoustic niche, as in the dawn chorus – are a vital part of the natural world, and a good guide to its health. Yet they are diminishing and disappearing. Bernie Krause who has spent the last four decades chronicling them says that half can no longer be heard in the wild, and that it takes 200 times as long to record an hour of natural sounds, uninterrupted by human-made noise, than it did when he began.

Now, as I reported in my column in the Telegraph over the weekend, he and the composer, Richard Blackford, are combining natural sounds and human music into a symphony, to draw attention… Read More

So the Tories are likely to rule out building new onshore wind turbines after the end of the decade because, a senior Conservative said at the weekend they are “unpopular”. Don't get me wrong. There are good reasons for phasing subsidies down, and eventually out, and – with 4,300 turbines already in operation, another 3,500 approved or under construction, and a further 3,350 in the planning process, all on limited land space – for considering whether a halt should be called. But this is not one of them.

For a start, it is wrong. Despite all the vocal opposition – and the understandable anger of communities subjected to insensitive schemes – onshore wind remains surprisingly popular. Polls consistently show that two thirds of Britons support it, and the backing is not just coming from townie… Read More

"What's that, Skippy mate? You say you've got a right smelly one brewing?"

Flatulent cattle, we know, make global warming worse. Their belching and farting– and that of sheep and other ruminants – produces up to a quarter of the world’s emissions of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. But now another animal may leap to the rescue – the kangaroo.Snappily entitled Investigation of the microbial metabolism of carbon dioxide and hydrogen in the kangaroo foregut by stable isotope probing, a paper in the peer-reviewed ISME Journal carries the simple message – roo farts may save the world. Or rather, their absence.

Its Australian authors found that – though kangaroos “graze the same native pastures as cattle” and digest the vegetation in much the same way – their methane… Read More

London is the European capital most polluted by nitrogen dioxide. (Photo: PA)

London and South East England were hit by an even greater smog than the present one last month, but few people knew about it because the government did not go out of its way to make it public. As I reveal in a feature in today's Telegraph, it took place at the same time as smog in Paris caused the government to ban cars with even numbered plates from entering the city – and the pollution here reached similar levels. But we knew far less about the air we were breathing than about what was happening in France. And this was just the latest example of successive governments' reluctance to draw attention to a problem that kills 29,000 Britons a year…. Read More

So there it is. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has gone further than any of its predecessors in showing that global warming is already affecting the whole globe.

It reports that evidence of its impact can be found “on all continents and across the oceans” and adds that the world is “in many cases ill-prepared for risks form a changing climate.” And it warns that allowing it to continue will increase the risk of “severe, pervasive and irreversible” consequences, including “violent conflict” as people compete for dwindling resources.

Wheat yields, for example, have already suffered and could drop by a quarter between 2030 and 2049, it says, while “all aspects of food security are potentially affected.”, while the price of food could rise by up to 84 per cent by 2050.

In being quite so stark the IPCC is confounding expectations. Not, let it… Read More

Here's something that will raise the temperature of the global warming debate even further. Australian scientists have concluded that the island continent's heatwave last year only broke records because of man-made climate change.

Researchers have rarely been able to link specific examples of extreme weather to global warming, though scientists are virtually unanimous that more of them will occur as the world heats up. But the study, by a team at Melbourne University, reckons that the chances of the heatwave taking place were quintupled by the climate change, and that the hottest-ever-recorded year of 2013 would have been “virtually impossible” without it. And its conclusions have just been endorsed by the blue-chip World Meteorological Organisation WMO).

They are politically, as well as scientifically explosive, for Australia's (fairly) new Government has reacted aggressively to suggestions that global… Read More

"People who accumulate wealth should pay rent for living on the planet, and that means they have got to give it away". That's the provocative view of Doug Tompkins, the wealthy entrepreneur who founded North Face. And, as I describe in my weekend Telegraph column he does practice what he preaches. With his wife, he has spent $300 million on buying wild, beautiful land in Chile and Argentina specifically to donate it to the two countries as national parks.

So the snap judgment on the eco-friendliness of the Budget is now in, and it is almost unanimous: George Osborne has delivered his dirtiest deed to date. But I am not quite so sure. As Zhou Enlai is (wrongly) held to have said about the impact of the French Revolution, I think it's a little too early to tell.

For sure, the Budget – like almost all the Chancellor's activities over the last few years – gives the emphatic lie to his pre-election promise that, under his stewardship, the Treasury would become “a green ally, not a foe”. It is far from environmentalist. The few green measures it contains – such as (inadequately) increased funding for flood defences and support for energy-efficient combined heat and power plants – are outweighed by "brown" ones, like slackening air passenger duty on… Read More

Under threat: the village of Bampton is known globally for its starring role in 'Downton Abbey’. (Photo: Alamy)

Tonight a local council will decide whether severely to embarrass the Prime Minister in his own backyard. For if the West Oxfordshire District Council's planning committee gives the go ahead for a new development of 160 houses in the Cotswold village of Bampton, in Mr Cameron's constituency, it will make a mockery of his claims that the Government's controversial planning reforms “will make it easier for communities to say 'we are not going to have a big plonking housing estate landing next to the village’ ”.

But this, as I report in my weekend Telegraph column is just one among many cases throughout England where developers are seizing on a provision that allows them effectively to build where they like if… Read More

I’d be amazed if they fully realise it – let alone seize the opportunity – but ministers and the shale gas industry have just been flung a lifeline. A report by moderate environmental groups has come up with a series of sensible recommendations which, if implemented, would defuse much of the growing opposition to fracking.

The report – produced by six groups including the National Trust, the Wildlife Trusts and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – has already been attacked from both sides of the debate. The UK Onshore Operators Group (UKOOG), representing the industry, attacked “critical inaccuracies” in the report, even though it had been peer-reviewed by the blue-chip Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, while radical protesters accused it of not going far enough.